Relationship With ITIL and Other Practicesand Standardsby Richard Moore

What are the Other Standards?

There are many different best practices, frameworks, and standards related to IT management such as ITIL, COBIT, PMBOK, PRINCE2, ISO/IEC 20000, ASL, BISL, to mention a few.

While these best practices and frameworks have placed emphasis on process, the IT4IT standard is processagnostic, focusing on how the IT function can be automated and supported by the right information (or data) to do the work. In addition, the IT4IT Reference Architecture provides the bigger picture of how IT services should be managed, throughout the entire lifecycle, by looking holistically at the entire IT Value Chain.

Positioning ITIL and the Other Standards Against IT4IT

ITIL and COBIT are the most commonly used processoriented best practice frameworks for IT management. Both describe a broad range of processes and activities to be performed by the IT function throughout the service lifecycle. However, ITIL does not cover all processes and activities within the IT function, such as Enterprise Architecture, Project Management, IT Governance, Risk Management, or Service Development. Domain-specific practices such as the TOGAF methodology for Enterprise Architecture, PMBOK or PRINCE2 for Project Management, and CMMI and SCRUM for Service Development can be used to complete the process model. In addition, there are numerous other standards and practices required to support specific controls, such as related to security management (ISO/IEC 27000 series) or risk management. These different practices and standards are typically defined at a high level, defining the requirements and activities to be

performed within the IT organization. However, before they can be used in day-to-day practice they require a significant effort of design and detailing, often resulting in reinventing the wheel by each individual organization. As a result, the IT organization is challenged to create an overarching IT management model bringing it all together supported by an integrated IT management system.

The Typical Challenges With the Existing Standards

Typical challenges with these existing standards and best practices:

• Lacking full coverage of the entire service lifecycle; typically, multiple standards and practices need to be combined to provide a full management model. Standards are not “aligned”; each using their own terminology and data models.

• Lacking standard information (or data) models to enable data integration between IT management tools to increase transparency and improve decision-making.

IT4IT Series #3 | ATL005:3

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Strategy toPortfolio

Requirement toDeploy

Request to Fulfill

Supporting Activities

Detect toCorrect

IT4IT Reference Architecture

ITIL (and ISO/IEC 20000)

ITIL

ISO/IEC 27000 series

ISO/IEC 38500

...

COBIT

COBIT

SCRUM

CMMI for Dev

PMBOK (or PRINCE2)

ArchiMate

TOGAF

SAFe

© Copyright 2016 Good e-Learning. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, resold, stored in a retrieval system, or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Such requests for permission or any other comments relating to the material contained in this document may be submitted to: marketing@goodelearning.com. Good e-Learning is a trading name used by

Educational Systems Ltd. The Open Group® and IT4IT® are registered trademarks of the Open Group in the United States and other countries

• Focus on individual processes and activities but not defining consistent end-to-end workflows to deliver value to the business.

• No overarching model to melt the different best practices, frameworks, and standards into actual solutions that can be used to support day-to-day activities.

• Not prescriptive enough to guide how activities should be performed to enable automation and interoperability between IT management tools and service providers.

How IT4IT Fills the Gaps

To transition the IT organization to become the IT service broker and integrator, a reference model is needed to provide a framework of what is required to run this new IT environment. The IT organization needs to design, build, and implement a solid IT management capability that supports all IT processes through the lens of the IT4IT value streams. The IT4IT standard enables the implementation of this integrated IT management system (or IT4IT management system) to provide an optimized work environment for the IT employees as well as for the business to interact with the IT organization. This IT management system consists of all IT management tools, information, and interfaces to support all IT management activities; enabling fully automated workflows across the many different technologies, teams, and service providers.

How IT4IT Should be Used in Combination With ITIL and Othere PracticesAt the top layer the IT4IT standard provides an integrated and holistic view using value streams. This layer is process and technology-agnostic. It provides the model of how the IT function should be working from an end-to-end perspective. The value streams can also be used as a governance model to assign ownership for IT management capabilities to support, evaluate, and continuously improve IT management practices. Every IT organization will benefit from the first step on the journey by adopting this holistic end-to-end view based upon the IT4IT value streams. Next to that, a selective set of best practices needs to be chosen such as the TOGAF standard, ITIL, and PMBOK (or PRINCE2). These practices further refine the requirements for specific areas such as project management, service development, and IT Service Management. The

IT4IT Reference Architecture then provides the glue to incorporate these practices into an IT operating model that can be used to implement the entire IT function supported by automated tools and interfaces using a standard information model. ITIL can therefore still be used to define additional specifications for IT activities to be performed. COBIT can also be added to extend ITIL with specific controls and practices that can be audited and assessed from an IT governance perspective. ITIL and the IT4IT Standard

ITIL and the IT4IT standard are complementary. The IT4IT standard provides the bigger picture to integrate multiple practices needed to manage IT such as ITIL, SCRUM, and PMBOK. In addition, the IT4IT standard provides the architecture to define the target state IT operating model covering a prescriptive definition of how IT needs to work.

The IT4IT Reference Architecture is not based on greenfield thinking. IT4IT components can be added incrementally to existing practices to integrate, orchestrate, enhance, and enable the current way of working.

Summarizing the Relationship

Summarizing the relationship and unique proposition of the IT4IT Reference Architecture compared to existing frameworks and best practices:

• The IT4IT standard provides the overall end-to-end model of how the IT function should be managed using an IT Value Chain approach.

• The IT4IT standard helps to combine existing practices (such as ITIL) as well as emerging practices (such as SAFe) into a new IT operating model.

• The IT4IT standard provides new IT management practices such as DevOps, Agile, Lean software development, and Continuous Delivery.

• The IT4IT standard details how IT activities can be automated and supported by IT management tools (by defining a standard information model, functional components, and its interfaces).